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They are located in a similar climate to you in S. Alabama. I nam new and do not know but, I was under the impression that you could not import queens or bees from outside of the USA. I don't know if this applies to Canada, but I do recall that they cannot import bees from us. Ck your PM's.

Re: Five to thirty five

Actually u can order queens from Canada. There is an inspection fee per queen that u import. To order two queens fro Canada the total price is a hefty $135 after shipping and inspection upon arrival to the states. You are thinking of Australia, New Zealand and other countries u can look up.

Re: Five to thirty five

I don't see why it is impossible, in fact I have a similar plan for the new year. Which is to take my 15 colonies to 50 or more before the end of 2013.

The idea is to start with three frame splits per colony, raise my own queens using the Hopkins method and feed them like hell, so I can produce another split within 3 months. If I do this 3 more times between now and the end of next year I could have more than 50 colonies.

Possibly by mid year I should be making splits from the first split I made in December or those colonies will be adding brood to my next splits for faster colony build up.

I had done something similar to this earlier this year. Where grew 6 colonies to 15 just by splitting, feeding, and at that time I did it foundation-less (Had I equipment and foundation I would have done much better, however I didn't start until late February or was it March, not too certain). I even got a small harvest not so sure what will happen now that hurricane Sandy passed thru.

Re: Five to thirty five

I went from 17 last year to 35 at present. The biggest obstacle was building and painting all the boxes, covers and bottom boards. Most of the increase I did from splits and swarm captures. For me, a critical component is a good local queen breeder. It's hard for queens to mate in SF weather. You may not have that problem where you are.

Re: Five to thirty five

Earl, that's no fair, you live in Jamaica mon! You have year round opportunities compared to most of us, I'm jealous! What you do in that climate will differ greatly compared to ours. We could split all we want, but unless there are drones around to mate the virgin queens, we will have our splits disappear due to unmated queens becoming drone layers. My hives don't have a single drone in them, at least from my observation.

Re: Five to thirty five

Radar,

Just because I'm in CA doesn't mean the weather is always perfect, that would be So Cal that gets the good weather almost year round! Where I'm at it can get in the teens and sometimes snows but doesn't stick for long. No year round splitting here!

And yes, Canada and the northern states have it worse than me and you!

Re: Five to thirty five

Beecrazy
All I "know" about Randy Weaver's Buckfast queens are what I read on his website- I didn't see anything about being treatment free - might be worth a call and ask. I looked up the Ferguson website in Canada- I don't see where they say that they are treatment free but their hygenic testing numbers are impressive.

Re: Five to thirty five

Certainly feasible. I do better than that every summer with nucs. The biggest hurdle I see...do you have drawn comb, or will you be using foundation? I don't think it's possible if you have only foundation to give them.

Re: Five to thirty five

RAK,

Not doubting your accomplishment here but would like some details for personal reference on expansion.

Was that 10 to 75 in one year?
How did you go about splitting them and did you already have mated queens?
How many gallons of syrup did you use in that time?
Did you wait until the nuc sized split filled a 10 frame single deep and split again or wait until they built out two deeps and split four ways?

Re: Five to thirty five

Yes it took one year. The hives came out of the almonds so I picked the 10 strongest hives which some had 3 deeps packed with bees ready to swarm while others were about 20-25 frames of bees. The reason I did this is because I was testing to see if 10 to 100 hives is possible in one summer.

I constantly reared queen cells(with 3-5 more hives... so yeah I cheated(note:I reared drones too)) and took 6 frames of brood from each hive and made 2 frames nucs. A cell was placed into each nuc and then a week later another cell was placed again to insure that each nuc would have a good virgin. I still had av. 10-12% mating fail early spring but sometimes it went up to 30%. I then did this again. I did no syrup feeding because we had a VERY strong spring flow and summer. However I did toss some pollen sub here and there. Anyway I split a second time about 2 weeks later and did this till I had 80 hives with the starting ten. It takes 1.5-2 months(in a flow) to get a strong doubles from 2 frames. About nine-ten hives ended up being a fail by September. Some of these 2 frame splits swarmed in August during the peppermint bloom because they got extremely overpopulated. (I had to migrate the 80 hives 3 times to get the good flow) beats feeding. I started feeding large amount of sub end of August to have very strong hives goin to winter that way they should be strong for the Almonds.

Going to 100 from 10 is probably possible, but I did not have enough time for all the splitting. You have to check if queens mated properly and always have to have queen cells on hand if the queen did not mate or else you will have nucs full of drone layers. The best mating I had this year was about 95% of 40 nucs(spare queens) I made. Buying queens will keep you from all the stress and is much easier to deal with.

I suggest that if your winters are warm the feed your bees Pollen sub constantly that way you could have very strong hives. Make sure you feeding 5lbs at a time not half a pound or else you won't see any good results.